1. Technical Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to communication systems; and, more particularly, it relates to performing modified error distance decoding of more than one signal being affected by a common deleterious effect such as burst noise, distortion, etc.
2. Description of Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. Generally speaking, a data communication system may be viewed as supporting the transmission of any of a variety of types of information (e.g., data, voice, media, etc.) from a first location to a second location within such a communication system. Communication systems are known to support wireless and wire lined communications between wireless and/or wire lined communication devices. Also generally speaking, within the context of communication systems that employ various types of communication devices, there is a first communication device at one end of a communication channel with encoder capability and second communication device at the other end of the communication channel with decoder capability. In many instances, one or both of these two communication devices includes encoder and decoder capability (e.g., within a bi-directional communication system). Transferring information from one location to another can be applied generally within any type of communication system, including those that employ some form of data storage (e.g., hard disk drive (HDD) applications and other memory storage devices) in which data is processed and/or encoded before writing to the storage media, and then the data is processed and/or decoded after being read/retrieved from the storage media.
Certain communication systems employ one or more of various types of coding (e.g., error correction codes (ECCs) and/or forward error correction (FEC) codes whose decoding may be performed iteratively) to ensure that the data extracted from a signal received at one location of a communication channel is the same information that was originally transmitted from another location of the communication channel. Communications systems with iterative codes are often able to achieve lower bit error rates (BER) than alternative codes for a given signal to noise ratio (SNR).
In addition, any of a variety of types of communication systems may employ one or more of various types of signaling (e.g., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), code division multiple access (CDMA), synchronous code division multiple access (S-CDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), etc.) to allow more than one user access to the communication system. Such signaling schemes may generally be referred to as multiple access signaling schemes.
In accordance with processing signals transmitted across a communication channel within such communication systems, sometimes more than one signal is affected by a common deleterious effect such as burst noise, distortion, etc. That is to say, such a deleterious effect can affect more than one signal similarly. The prior art does not adequately provide for means to address and overcome such deleterious effects as may be incurred among multiple signals within a communication system.